VIENNA, December 30, 2017 – To most foreigners,
there are two kinds of Austrians: The ones who ski and the ones who have to
explain why they don’t. Although the top club membership and TV viewing numbers
belong to football, few countries are more closely associated with their
national sport. Skiers like Franz Klammer, Hermann Maier or now Marcel Hirscher
are generational superstars, no event is more important than the legendary
Hahnenkamm downhill race in Kitzbühel, no Olympic medals are more coveted than
the skiing ones.

The days of nine Austrians coming first
at a world cup race are long gone, but there still is enough success for
skiing to be Austria’s happy place. A source of identification. A source of
pride. But recently: a source of shock, horror and shame.

“There were attacks,
sexualized violence – by coaches, by attendants, by teammates and by ski
technicians.” The
former skier Nicola Werdenigg wrote those words in an extensive monologue for
Der Standard, kicking off a sexual abuse scandal centered on skiing boarding
schools. In the wake of the #metoo movement, Werdenigg recounted harrowing
stories of a sadistic school director who had encouraged a schoolmate to rape
her. As she managed to defend herself with a kick in the crotch, the director
was standing outside her room, eavesdropping and masturbating. “The fact that
the man who staged this act of misogyny pleasured himself in front of the door
of my room was the first big shock of my life,” she wrote in her monologue that
is available in English here.

Werdenigg escaped the perverted culture
established by the school director by transferring from the boarding school in Neustift
to the ski gymnasium in Stams. And although others revealed assaults at Stams in
the aftermath of her monologue, Werdenigg experienced a good atmosphere in this
once-revered institution, writing that the school offered her “a completely new
kind of socialization”.

Rape and bulimia

Yet the suffering was not over. Werdenigg’s
first full world cup season came in 1973; she was 15 years old, racing under
her maiden name Spieß. The “insanely permissive” environment of the skiing circuit
brought out the worst in some: “When I was 16, two men got me drunk and one of
the two raped me. It is something that weighed heavily on me for years.”

As many victims do, Werdenigg blamed herself.
She started suffering from bulimia, later connecting her sickness to the sexism
and abuse of power rampant in skiing circles. “For 10 years, I abused my young
body with uncontrolled gorging and purging,” the now-59-year-old wrote. Shortly
after the publication of Werdenigg’s monologue, another female skier active in
the 1970s came forward to Der Standard and confirmed the reports under the
condition of anonymity. She recounted how a drunk coach pulled her into his
hotel room in broad daylight and attempted to rape her, the skier almost breaking
her hand as she defended herself.

The Austrian skiing federation’s immediate
handling of the scandal was rather clumsy. Some statements were well-meaning,
but uneducated, some were intentionally deflective. ÖSV president Peter
Schröcksnadel drew criticism for pressuring Werdenigg to name names and allegedly
threatening legal consequences if she wouldn’t, but later stated that he had
been misquoted and only sent her a “friendly letter” asking for more
information to weed out the perpetrators. As the public prosecutor started an
investigation, the skiing federation did the same, bringing in the victim protection
lawyer Waltraud Klasnic – a move criticized by Werdenigg among others. She
argued that there would not be an independent investigation and called the ÖSV
trying to process the scandal internally instead of relying on an external
investigation “inconceivable”.

There was plenty to be investigated: The school
director that was responsible for Werdenigg’s experiences in Neustift was a
pedophile who would visit regularly visit schoolboys in their beds in the
1970s, the mother of a former student told Der Standard. The pedophile was
stripped of his position after targeting the son of an influential skiing
official towards the end of the decade, but was allowed to remain at the school
as a teacher, as confirmed by multiple former students and internal records. The
mother says that her son begged her not to speak out against the disgraced
director in order to not endanger his career as a skier; she complied, but thinks
that her son’s experiences drove him into drug abuse. He died of a heroin
overdose before his 22nd birthday. The former director now lives in
Austria’s westernmost state, Vorarlberg. He denies all accusations.

The Austrian system

Whether at schools or in world cup skiing, the
core message of all who spoke out had been: These were not isolated cases. The
culture of sexual abuse prevalent in Austrian skiing was later confirmed by the
British skier-turned-journalist Helen Scott-Smith. The British world cup team
had Austrian coaches when she was a young skier. “The coaches divided up the
15- to 20-year-old girls among themselves. They called them 'fresh meat' and
they helped themselves,” she told Der Standard in an interview,
adding: “Of course, not all Austrian coaches were like that.” Scott-Smith stood
up to the coaches which led to them leaving her out of the team for the Innsbruck
Olympics in 1976. “You didn’t do everything we wanted of you,” they told her.

After leaving active skiing to study,
Scott-Smith returned to the sport as a freelance journalist in 1987. A
different time, some may think. Yet: “When I was 34 years old, I was raped by a
ski technician for an Austrian skier,” the 1958-born Scott-Smith revealed.

Back to the start: skiing boarding schools. These
schools are a vital part of the Austrian winter sports system, the gymnasium
Stams alone has produced winners of over 300 Olympic and world cup medals. It
has also produced hundreds of broken boys and girls. Less than two weeks after
Werdenigg’s monologue, another successful athlete came forward under the
condition of anonymity. He had attended Stams in the 1980s and 90s and spoke
out against the practice of “pasting”, a frequent ritual in the elite school:
“Toothpaste or a more-or-less sticky substance would be administered anally.
That means, a tube would be inserted. The worst would be grip wax designed for
wet snow in cross-country skiing.”

The pasting horrors

Pasting used to be a common practice in
Austrian sports, often used as an initiation ritual. “It’s not some kind of half-romantic
story, it's blatant violence. Pasting victims would sometimes stand in the
shower for three hours afterwards, and not just to clean themselves. They would
sob out of shame, despair and anger,” the anonymous former Stams student said
in an interview.

The athlete had never fallen victim himself,
but had been witness to multiple pastings. He described it as a means to exert
power and establish a hierarchy. “It's
something that passes from one generation to the next […] Many victims became
perpetrators. Pasting was an insidious part of normalcy, of the day-to-day.
Teachers and other faculty weren't around when pasting took place, but they
often know what is going on because they, too, went to the Stams boarding
school,” he said.

The triple nordic combined Olympic champion
Felix Gottwald backed
him up, saying that these rituals were part of everyday life in Stams. “I
had the impression that towards the end of my time in Stams, the head warden’s
efforts against pasting bore fruit and pasting as a ritual was abolished,”
Gottwald wrote. He had left Stams in the early 90s.

Consequences

2017 is not 1973. The atrocities that have come
to light have hopefully passed forever, the culture has surely changed – and most
of the crimes are past the statute of limitations according to Austrian law. In
addition to the investigations by the public prosecutor and the ÖSV, an
external commission put in place by the state of Tyrol has taken up its work. Victims
may receive financial compensation by the state.

But the shock remains. Where the public once
admired the nimbus of the cadre factories, they now see what so many of the
adored stars and medal winners went through – as victims, as perpetrators, as
both. Remember the clean sweep mentioned in the beginning, the race that had
nine Austrians among the top nine? Three of them went to Stams.